Magnus Lindberg

* Cantigas*
* Cello Concerto**
* Parada
* Fresco

Christopher O'Neal (oboe)
Anssi Karttunen (cello)
Philharmonia/Esa-Pekka Salonen.
Sony SK 89810  TT: 79:37

Summary for the Busy Executive: You win some, you lose some.

I enjoy listening to contemporary music from all over the spectrum:
tonal, various degrees of serial, atonal, minimal, post-Expressionist,
neo-Romantic, post-Modern, and so on and so forth.  Many of my
musically-inclined friends ask me how I can stand listening to this stuff
when the chances are so low of finding another Mahler.  I figured out
that I listen to music differently from my friends.  I'm not necessarily
interested in finding another undoubted masterpiece, although I certainly
won't sniff at one if I fall over it.  I spend a lot more time trying
to "get" what the composer has to tell me.  I don't appreciate musical
puzzles for their own sake or particularly care about how a composer
generates a piece, although, again, I won't pooh-pooh the technical
information that comes my way or that I can glean for myself.  The result
ultimately counts.  For example, for many years I knew exactly what was
going on technically in Brahms's symphonies.  However, I couldn't answer
the most important question: why it should matter to me or why Brahms
thought his music would interest a listener at all.  However, I really
didn't have the ego to blame Brahms for his music's failure to win me
over.  Most important, I kept listening for a few decades until eventually
the music began to grip me.  It had nothing to do with the "difficulty"
of Brahms's music.  I was an immediate fan of Stravinsky, Bartok,
Hindemith, Varese, Carter, and Schoenberg.  I hope it had little to do
with my intelligence.  Most likely, I simply wasn't ready for the emotional
poetry of Brahms.

I indulge myself in the above bit of musical autobiography to explain
my reaction to some of the music of Magnus Lindberg.  The technical
stuff I get.  Cantigas, for example, is "about" tempo and intervallic
relationships.  But this is like saying a sonnet is "about" fourteen
iambic pentameter lines with a certain rhyme scheme.  If the piece can
offer only technique, who, other than technicians, should care?  I have
no idea why Lindberg or anyone else thinks the music effective.  For me,
all temporal art -- music, literature, dance -- deals ultimately in
transformation of perception through a progress of events.  Certainly,
Cantigas has the raw materials for such a transformation.  A section
based strongly on open fifths also includes an idea of arpeggios of
thirds upward and downward.  This leads to a section of superimposed
minor thirds.  Two superimposed minor thirds become an augmented fourth
(or diminished fifth), the material of the next section.  An augmented
fourth implies a whole-tone scale (three whole steps = an augmented
fourth), the material of what Lindberg describes as a transitional
section, and so on.  The music bristles with strong, dramatic gestures,
but they seem isolated.  It's like watching a bubbling pot of oatmeal
-- frenetic, undifferentiated activity.  I should admit that the quieter
sections work best for me, especially Chris O'Neal's extended oboe solos
-- I finally get the sense of a progression rather than "one damn thing
after another." And there's a killer coda.  It may be that Lindberg's
scoring is just too thick in the louder passages and events move too
quickly for me.  If so, it's probably just a matter of more listening
before stuff falls into place.

The same kinds of ideas and gestures as in Cantigas permeate Lindberg's
cello concerto, but (for me) to quite different effect.  The only way
I can put it is that I experience the music as less cramped and feel a
long progression.  The piece begins nervously and ends in great calm.
It's even a noble work.  The relation between soloist and ensemble is
fairly interesting and reminds me a bit of the Toch cello concerto:
essentially chamber music on a large scale.  This isn't the usual
soloist-against-the-mass, but an interaction of equals, with the cello
first among equals.  Lindberg deals with the usual cello-concerto problem
(the orchestra covering up the solo) in an unusual way, in that, unlike
Dvorak, for example, he's not afraid to occasionally sink the cello in
the orchestral sound.  He also does not, like Dvorak's breathtakingly
simple solution, maintain a strict separation between orchestra and
soloist through assigning different dynamics to tutti and accompanied
sections.  Lindberg remarks, in an interview with Martin Anderson, that
the cello has quite a strong voice.  Its problem is its range.  The
higher instruments can mask its line.  Accordingly, many of the louder
passages for the soloist occur among the lower instruments or instruments
in the low part of their range.  Again, however, this is all technique,
and one's interest in technique really comes after the experiencing the
considerable emotional impact of the work.  Kudos here to the soloist,
Anssi Karttunen, who never allows the quicker passages to degenerate
into mere fingerwork and who sings gorgeously when called on.

Parada lays out two different sets of thematic materials -- one busy,
the other granitic, massive, and almost glacially slow -- and develops
each separately.  In saying "develop," one implies that necessary
transformation of temporal art.  The unusual feature here is that the
two parts never seem to converge.  The composer must have deliberately
made this a part of his design.  We're so used to "sonata unity" -- the
uniting of seemingly disparate, contrasting elements -- that we may miss
the curve Lindberg has thrown, but really this is no more necessary than
identically-dressed best friends.  Lindberg provides some really interesting
moments along the way, including a somewhat jazzy passage for the faster
material.  My only adverse criticism is that Lindberg gives very little
relief.  The scoring tends to over-thickness.  Nevertheless, the piece
carries you along.

Fresco works pretty much the same way as Parada -- contrast of parallel,
non-intersecting sets of material -- but it's longer and one apprehends
large sections of the work.  The more compact Parada tends to go in one
long breath.  Again, however, I don't feel much progression, perhaps
because the basic material strikes me as rather unmemorable.  Lindberg
gives you jolts along the way in the form of dramatic gesture, but how
these gestures connect with anything I have no idea.  I experienced it
as a kind of musical Turette's.

Maybe this is Salonen's fault.  I've never fallen under his spell.
I consider him very often slapdash and undifferentiating in performance.
He's one of those conductors, like Solti, who's so busy digging his
elbows into your ribs he loses the coherence of the "story." The
Philharmonia plays difficult contemporary music as well as they can under
the circumstances.  Sony's sound seems excessively "bass-y" and closely
miked, which doesn't help the feeling of relentless hammering at your
head in Fresco.  I need an aspirin.

Steve Schwartz